A note in
the announcement of Activision Blizzard's stock buyback from Vivendi offers
the latest subscriber numbers for World of Warcraft. The
last census for
the game put the playerbase at 8.3 million, and word is they have lost about
600K of them since then: "Blizzard Entertainment’s World of Warcraft® remained
the world’s #1 subscription-based MMORPG, ending the quarter with approximately
7.7 million subscribers."

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If Joe Developer launched subscription MMO #758 today, and ended up with 7.7 million subscribers, the game would be considered wildly successful.

BitWraith wrote on Jul 26, 2013, 15:19:FTP games are successful. WoW is trending downwards. Blizzard is run by smart people, they are talking about this, I promise you.

Absolutely. Blizzard has been talking about it for years. I remember reading quotes from them on it back when their subscriptions were still climbing like mad. They are well aware that the popularity of games waxes and wanes, and they took that into account.

Back when Wrath was first announced they said that they planned to take the game to around level 100, by which time they expected that WoW's decline would be well underway, and while they'd maintain and patch WoW, they'd focus their development efforts on other projects (presumably Titan.)